a visit with Rich Starr

part of my craft genealogy thread...

[a post stemming from a visit this week and some correspondence over the past few years. An earlier look at some of Rich Starr’s impact is here https://peterfollansbeejoinerswork.substack.com/p/nothing-new-under-the-sun ]

Recently George Sawyer https://www.instagram.com/sawyer_made/?hl=en invited me to tag along with him on a visit to Rich Starr. I first met Rich back in the mid-1990s when he & I worked along with Jennie Alexander on a version of JA’s chairmaking video. That was eventually scrapped and re-done - what I remember most about that week is that Alexander was having back spasms the entire time, while trying to make a chair on-camera. Starr was videographer and editor, I was the prep chef, making chair parts off-screen. 

But that’s not what made me jump at the chance to re-visit Rich. He’s a very important part of the story I’m writing about my craft genealogy. I first heard of him in the early years of Fine Woodworking magazine - the cover of issue #6 (Spring 1977) features his work on making wooden screws.

The bio from that article reads: “Richard Starr, 33, teaches hand woodworking to grades 6, 7 and 8 at Richmond School in Hanover, N.H. Starting with a clue provided by an old-time craftsman and references in musty books, he rediscovered this technology.”

Forty years later, I would learn who that “old-time craftsman” was, but that’s getting ahead of the story. From time to time, I’d see Rich’s name and articles in the magazine, eventually tied to his work with school kids which culminated in the book Woodworking with Kids that Taunton Press published in 1982.

woodworking with kids

I didn’t have kids then but saw the articles and the book and couldn’t help but be impressed by what he was doing with his students. Over the years I worked at making furniture in a museum setting, I would often hear stories of school districts/systems, etc that one-by-one were eliminating shop classes (& art, music, etc) from their programs. How and why that happened is a huge subject and not mine to tackle - I hated shop class when I took it in the early 1970s - and decades later my own kids were homeschooled. So my thoughts and opinions on the subject carry little weight. 

But it is undisputed that Rich was able to create and run a program in a middle school in which kids not only succeeded in making things from wood, but flourished. There seemed to be few limits to what was possible. As we were talking about it the other day, I asked who drove the ideas for the projects. Most often it was the kids - Rich showed us a beautiful canoe model - some kid wanted to make a boat, so he had to figure out how. And then they did it. And guitars, doll houses, furniture, drawing tables, music stands, dog houses and on and on. The book is filled with projects ranging from simple to astoundingly complex. The kids used saws, chisels, planes, foot-powered lathes, even axes and froes for a time. And none of this was a flash-in-the-pan - Rich ran that program for over 47 years!